


On This, the Night of My Repairing

by arcapelago (arcanewinter)



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21716836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanewinter/pseuds/arcapelago
Summary: Erik has offered Charles a home, at his side at long last, but Charles has doubts about whether he belongs there.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 20
Kudos: 107
Collections: Secret Mutant Exchange 2019





	On This, the Night of My Repairing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ikeracity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ikeracity/gifts).



“I don’t think I can do this.”

Charles had stopped within two rotations of his wheels on the gritty beach of the island. By his request, they had arrived modestly, by boat, some distance away from the commune, asleep at this late hour.

Erik stopped with him. He glanced over the way ahead of them, where he had just set down and leveled a smooth path made from the piles of scrap metal, wrested from the ocean, that rested closer to the thick tree line.

“It’s not all sand,” Erik answered, blithely. “I promise you.” Beyond this temporary path was stable, compacted earth, even pavers in some areas. But he knew that this was not what Charles meant. In a way, he had expected it.

Perhaps it had been too easy, thus far–that Charles had not protested much in Paris, that when Erik returned on the appointed day to retrieve him and a few belongings, Charles–the great orator–had not had much to say, or to ask.

But now he sat with his hands still tightly gripping his wheels, stationary, and seemingly burgeoning with unrest and uncertainty. Seemingly, because his mind remained uncharacteristically locked away. His eyes were set on the far-off community that could barely be seen over the vegetation, but Erik’s attention remained on him.

“You’re listening to them,” said Erik, if Charles wouldn’t. “What are they telling you?”

“That they don’t want me here.” He suddenly seemed lost. He seemed utterly unacquainted with the sensation, and frustrated in acknowledgment of it.

Erik turned more fully to regard him. The night was nearing its coldest hour, and the sea was thick in his joints and in the damp of his hair, but there was no rush in him. He had learned– _God_ , he had learned. How many times had this moment fallen apart in his hands? And never so close to the goal. It was waiting for them, just a little further down the shore, decades of mistakes partially undone.

“Our right to this place would not have been possible without you,” Erik offered. “Or at least, the fight would have been a lot more bloody. Aren’t they telling you that, as well?”

Charles cocked his head slightly, appraising him as though he were ignoring the obvious.

But the obvious did not come easily. When Erik refused to fill it in, Charles folded his hands over the duffel in his lap.

“They hold me responsible for the death of their friends,” he said. “Of Raven. Not least because you do.”

Charles held Erik’s gaze as he spoke. Erik would have commended him, but he himself was the first to look away, into the black waves stretching out under the stars, toward a home he had lost twice over by now. Each and every failure to protect the ones he loved was another length of barbed wire around his chest, to pierce him whenever it might swell with happier things.

They were neither of them innocent. They hadn’t been for a long time.

He turned and sat down in the cold sand beside Charles’ chair.

When it became clear in his silence that he wasn’t going anywhere, Charles huffed set his bag aside. He edged himself down from his chair and onto the sand, drawing himself beside Erik with less difficulty than Erik was guilty of expecting. He waited until Charles had settled.

“Would you ever have denied me?”

Erik lifted his voice over the sound of the surf, but it wasn’t truly necessary. He left his mind open as Charles looked him over.

“If I’d shown up on the steps of your house, your school, after everything, would you have turned me away?”

Charles seemed to enjoy the question in spite of himself. His mouth suppressed a smile. “There was a time I would have.” But then: “No, that’s a lie. Even then. Erik, I never wanted anything more than to–”

He stopped, leaving Erik to wonder. Charles still wasn’t sharing his thoughts. Perhaps, for once, he was no longer proud of them. Or sure of them.

“Do you think your students, your teachers, would have welcomed me? After adopting your ideologies?”

“They’re independent thinkers,” Charles protested. “I haven’t–”

“They can’t help it.” And Erik didn’t blame them. It was a long time ago, now, but even he had once fallen under the spell of that peculiarly confident optimism, that compassionate pigheadedness. Charles was a natural leader. And at his worst–perhaps at his best–Erik still found himself following. “My point is, you would have let me in.”

Charles watched him a moment. Erik knew he couldn’t deny it. Instead, he shivered.

“And besides that, my word is not law here,” he said, shrugging out of the old leather jacket he was wearing and dropping it over Charles’ shoulders. “We took a vote. But I suppose people don’t dream about civic duties or you'd have known that.”

He then called to him a small section of iron hull from one of the debris piles. He drove it into the sand in front of them and spun it to dig out a small depression, then crushed it into a sphere to fit in the cleared space. He continued crushing it, forcing the metal to slide and strain against itself until the friction caused it to sear away the moisture in the sand around it. When it began to glow red from the heat, Erik let it rest.

The breeze off the ocean was fair, but Erik could feel the considerable warmth on his face and his hands. Charles was staring at what Erik had made with another smile on his lips, absently fingering the worn edge of the jacket as he drew it close around him. ‘ _Marvelous_ ,’ Erik thought he heard, but it was only his memory. Charles still wasn’t speaking, not in that way.

“This reminds me of the jacket you took to Russia,” Charles said. He was still smiling, studying a button on the double-breasted front.

“How do you know it’s not the same one?”

“Because I stole it.”

Erik smiled with some confusion. “I probably left it. After the mission, I never–”

“No, I definitely stole it before that.”

Amused, Erik watched him with a furrowed brow. These were not the first memories that surfaced when he thought back to that time, their only true partnership, the birth of all that was to follow. But yes, in those weeks at the mansion, when Erik had been living under Charles’ roof, and their rooms were just across an admittedly wide hallway from each other, he had, on occasion, found his clothing on Charles’ person with no explanation.

Erik had never asked him. At the time it baffled and irritated him, but they’d all had more important problems to solve.

Now, though, it was just the two of them, on an island removed from the unpredictable, uncontrollable world that had interfered for far too long. “Why did you ever do that?”

Charles laughed shortly. He lifted his eyes to the night sky, avoiding the answer, perhaps, but eventually he gave in. He eased himself down to lie on his back on the sand, and after a moment Erik moved to lie beside him, propped up on one elbow.

When he had settled, Charles looked at him with an easier expression on his face than Erik had seen for some time.

“You were like James Bond,” Charles said. “Handsome. Dangerous. Smartly dressed. And who was I?”

“Wealthy enough not to need to impress.” Erik smiled. “That was my impression.”

Charles laughed hard with his hands on his stomach, his shoulders lifting out of the jacket before he settled back again. “That bad, really?”

“No,” Erik confessed. “Some people enjoy the dusty look.”

“Too bad everyone’s wearing turtlenecks nowadays,” Charles countered. “You’ve lost your edge.”

Charles had lifted his hand to the side of Erik’s neck. He could feel the roughness of the sand on Charles’ fingertips, and he leaned closer to him, resting his hand on Charles’ chest. Charles shivered again, but Erik didn’t draw it away. Instead, he felt his way nimbly over the contours of the muscles hardly softened by the sweater Charles wore and sought the warmth along his side, under the folds of the jacket. He was leaning into him more closely now. The expression on Charles’ face had not told him to stop. On the contrary.

“What can I possibly do for you, here?” Charles murmured. His brow was deeply furrowed with conflict, but he had slipped his other hand into Erik’s hair, a plea for closeness, a need that Erik understood, that he echoed. “I don’t belong here.”

“Do you think I turn mutants away because they can’t till a field? Or build a shed? Be their counsel. Be their friend. Be their chef if that makes you happy.”

Charles laughed weakly. Erik could feel the deflation of his ribs under his hand and he closed his fist around Charles’ sweater there, and the skin beneath it. When Charles gasped, Erik kissed him, gently despite the suddenness of it, and less so as Charles’ hands moved to the back of his neck to hold him there, to urge him. Charles never closed his lips against him. Instead, he sought ever more contact, until Erik had lost his breath and a little of his mind, quaking against him with an entire lifetime of unanswered anticipation fulfilled, _being_ fulfilled, if Charles would only accept his offer.

“I need you, Charles,” he said, still pressed to him, his eyes tightly shut as though he’d wake up before this was over, before he could see this through. “You have always done good. You have always been good. That is all that I want in this place, now. That is all I’m asking.”

Of God, of his fellow mutants, of the unknowable years he had left to him. That was all.

That was all.

He could feel the thrum of Charles’ heartbeat against his fist, a hundred times between the sounds of each lapping wave, or maybe it was his own. Even the breath he was holding didn’t slow it down. Even the weight of his own desperation couldn’t stifle it. “Please, Charles.”

“All right.”

Erik finally opened his eyes. He was still there, in the cold sand, on a real beach outside the sanctuary he had built for them, for their kind. And Charles hadn’t moved, except to take Erik’s face in his hands. “All right,” Charles repeated.

_Let’s go home._


End file.
